Cybermage by Alma Alexander

Author:Alma Alexander [Alma Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: en
ISBN: 9780060839611
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-02-10T05:00:00+00:00

10.

“OKAY, ONE MORE TIME,” said Ben, ticking his points off on the fingers of his right hand. “These so-called Elemental pigeons were somehow detached from Nikola Tesla; they’re little magical Elements, and they are still potentially alive and flitting around New York City decades after any ordinary pigeon would have kicked the bucket. The Alphiri buy this idea and send a pigeon-hunting team to New York. Humphrey May, the highest authority on this subject right now in our polity, speaking straight from the heights of the FBM and all of its vast and all-powerful knowledge, buys this idea—to the extent of okaying a pigeon hunt of our own, before, quote, ‘the Alphiri get them.’ But not even Humphrey May is sure whether said pigeons, assuming they exist, and can be caught, can even be…what did you call it, Thea?…rejoined to the original Tesla entity. And if they can, nobody has any idea what would happen next. How am I doing so far?”

“Pretty much covers it,” Thea said.

They had gathered together, all six of them, in what Kristin called Thea’s pseudo-classroom—a bubble-universe classroom emptied of its student population, shielded, warded, and made safe for Terry to speak his mind in. Thea had called them in to report on the outcome of her conversation with Humphrey May, and, with a twinge of guilty misgivings, to inform them that she had volunteered them all for the pigeon-hunting project.

And Ben, judging from the sharper-than-usual edge of sarcasm in his words and the tone of his voice, wasn’t taking to the idea very well.

“And you agreed to help him find these…these…” Ben waved his hand in front of his face, helplessly searching for the right adjective. “It’s a wild goose chase!”

“Wild pigeon,” Kristin said, grinning.

Ben growled at her.

“Terry…it might come down to you, in the end,” Thea said, turning away from Ben.

“You’re thinking that anything remotely like a rejoining would somehow have to happen inside a cyber-environment,” Terry said. “It makes sense; that’s the only place where all the pieces can actually exist together without violating all kinds of real-world rules. But what do you want me to do about it?”

“You’d need to write something. Some kind of code that unifies the pieces that were scattered and makes it all whole again.”

“That’s quite a job,” Terry said, a strange expression on his face.

“Well, you’ve had practice,” Tess said. “The Twitterpat thing in the Nexus. You’ve worked with it for quite a while now.”

“Yes, but Twitterpat wrote that. All I did was tinker.”

“Yeah, right, and you’re so bad at tinkering that they handed you the Nexus on a silver platter,” Ben said.

“I thought you were against this whole idea,” Magpie said, turning to him.

“I am!” Ben said. “I think the whole thing is getting weirder and more out of control. I’d like to see a shred of concrete evidence.”

“Your father is a scientist, isn’t he?” Kristin murmured.

“So?”

“Sometimes,” Kristin said, “you have to have faith first and evidence later.”

“Oohhhh,” Ben said, turning away. “You started all this, you know.

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